Aspiration-first vs reality-first

Over the years I've noticed people seem to have two fundamental orientations towards goals: aspiration-first and reality-first.

Aspiration-first thinking starts with an external or motivational stance. For example: "I need to lose 20 lb before summer to fit into my beach clothes / reach a certain BMI / etc" Or in business: "We need $1MM ARR this year because that's the benchmark for companies of our stage." From there, achievement is throwing stuff against the wall till something hits the right trajectory.

Reality-first thinking starts with understanding the reality of a situation or system and works from there. For example: "Studies suggest sustainable weight loss is 300-500kcal deficit per day, so I should lose Xlb by summer. But also I like eating, so maybe (X - 5)lb is a better goal." Or: "Historically our revenue growth has been X per month, but our sales process isn't as efficient as it could be, so with some tweaks we should be able to get it to (120% of X) per month."

This rhymes a bit with "top-down" vs "bottom-up," but I don't think they are the same. If an experienced CEO says "we should get our revenue up 15% within the next 6 months," that's top-down but could be reality-first because that goal is informed by a long career in similar companies where they have increased revenue by 15% in 6 months. Likewise, a bottom-up goal might be "reduce server costs 20%" in service of reducing burn rate... But that 20% number could be completely aspirational with no basis in reality.

Both approaches have their pro's and con's. Reality-first has the obvious advantage of being easier to reason about: either execution is off, or an assumption about reality was wrong. In that way, the lines of accountability are clearer. There's no "shucks we tried, but..." However, sometimes a situation is so uncertain that you have no choice but to be aspirational. (Though I'd argue that "setting goals" is less useful then, vs taking a stance of "learning about reality.") Lastly: the "big hairy audacious" goals that are popular in management literature are aspirational by definition, so they may be necessary for certain types of work.

To the surprise of absolutely nobody, I favor the reality-first approach as a developer-slash-systems-person. That might mean my goals are not as big, hairy, and audacious as they could be but... I can live with that :)